The first few months of his presidency would be brutal, in part because he would have to break a pledge he made about the debt limit. The more I think about what a Romney administration would look like, the more I think his promise of a 20 percent across-the-board cut in tax rates would have to go too:

The prevailing view has been that Romney will stick with his tax cuts, on the assumption that they are what matter most to Republicans. My own sense is that today’s Republicans care much more about spending. Romney adopted the 20 percent tax-cut plan late in the primaries, and it doesn’t seem to have stirred much grassroots enthusiasm. (Neither did most of his primary rivals’ tax-cut plans.)

All Romney said about taxes in his address to the Republican convention was that he would cut them for businesses and not raise them for the middle class. He isn’t running on his tax plan the way earlier Republican nominees such as George W. Bush, Bob Dole and Ronald Reagan ran on theirs.